Blanc
by Qoheleth
Summary: Close your eyes. Open your mind. Forget everything you think you know about a certain alien race. And meet Gabriela of Vuunyar.


_(The following is taken from what was formerly a mid-level classified document in the archives of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce's Xenoanthropological Division. Labelled only as "Special File Blanc", it consists of a number of handwritten sheets of notepaper enclosed in a white three-ring binder; neither the paper nor the writing gives any indication, to the lay eye, of the specific place or time of the document's composition. The text is in English, but the clumsiness of the handwriting – which often ignores the ruling of the paper, and regularly distorts certain letters – suggests either unfamiliarity with Earthly writing styles or inability to see the pages, perhaps both. There are also several marginal notes in a different and much more polished hand, which, however, I am not authorised to transcribe._

_ (It is my belief, as well as that of the U.N.I.T. officer who has authorised this transcription, that both the demands of justice and the desire for interplanetary tranquillity necessitate a broader familiarity, on the part of our race, with the viewpoint presented in Special File Blanc.)_

* * *

><p>You never forget the first time – at least, I never will. Maybe it's different for those who were born by the curse; maybe it seems natural to them, and it's ordinary life that they can't grow accustomed to. For that matter, there are some even among the Night-Born who seem to accept the curse with equanimity; our native powers, they argue, make the life that it forces upon us no real burden, so why should we complain of it? (Though Mother always said that those people minimized the evil of the curse only because they couldn't bear to contemplate it otherwise. "They're the most cursed of us all," she would say wryly. "They can't even look <em>truth<em> in the eye.")

But for me, it's quite otherwise. There is nothing I remember so vividly as the day – it was a Prudence-day, the third in the Month of Emeralds, according to the calendar of Aldla that was – when our Mistress of Rites came to the cavern where my mother and I dwelt, and told us that it was time for me to pay my respects to day.

It seemed to me that my mother was distressed; her heat-signature grew sharper, as happens when one's heart begins suddenly to beat more quickly, and there was a quiver in her voice as she made the reply. "It is well," she said. "Let her go forth, and let her return; let her greet the sun as a friend, and not allow our Enemy to make it an enemy unto her."

"Just so," said the Rite-Mistress. "Come, Gabriela." (She didn't call me Gabriela, of course; it was on another world, and from someone very different, that I received that name. But it is a name that has meant much to me, and I would gladly be named by it even in memory – and, in any event, my birth name is difficult to render in human speech.)

I reached out and took her hand, my own heart beating as quickly as my mother's – partly from a nervousness of my own in response to hers (for we were very close, and her feelings could not fail to affect mine), but much more from anticipation and excitement. From as far back as I could remember, the rumours of the surface world had held a particular fascination for me; the thought that I was now about to encounter it myself made me almost too weak to stand. Moreover, I knew that the surface walk was the threshold of adulthood, and that thrilled me all the more – not merely because it meant that I would soon be initiated into the unique arts of our people, and would learn to kythe and flesh-yester and do many other things besides, but also because, quite simply, I was tired of being a child. I had always resented the slowness with which my body had matured; even now, in my tenth year, my voice had yet to acquire its adult pitch, and I was nearly a head shorter than any other resident of the Vuunyar. I didn't suppose that my surface walk would change that, but it would make it irrelevant, and that thought was gladness enough.

So, as the Rite-Mistress led me through the miles of winding caverns that lay between my dwelling and the Vuunyar's western mouth, my body was a-tremble from head to foot; my footsteps echoed through the cavern like a toddler's, and, from the way that the leaves on my mollitors were rustling, you might have thought that a whirlwind was raging in the caves.

The Rite-Mistress could hardly fail to notice this, but she misinterpreted it drastically. "There is no need for fear, Gabriela," she said. "You will come to no harm on the surface. Kebes is a young world; her land-dwelling animal life is small and timid, and there is little of it near the Vuunyar in any case."

This meant little to me, not merely because it was meant to soothe fears that I did not feel, but also because, at that time, I understood only vaguely that I belonged to a cursed race. The job of teaching a child lore belonged, by custom, to the child's father; since my father had forsaken us for the yestering gangs when I was still an infant, and since my mother (who never ceased to hope for his return) was reluctant to assume his responsibilities herself, I had grown up knowing little of our history beyond what I happened to absorb from the conversations of my elders – and the curse, of course, was hardly a topic for casual conversation. I knew that there was a shadow attached to being what we were, and I understood, in a vague sort of way, that it was out of resentment at this shadow that my father had left the Vuunyar; beyond that, I was almost appallingly innocent.

So, rather than being soothed and calmed as the Rite-Mistress intended, I took her words as an opportunity to talk about the surface, and asked her what the animals that did live near the Vuunyar were like. She seemed uncomfortable, but replied that they were much like the many-legged creatures that lived in the caverns, save for the specialised forelimbs that allowed them to tunnel through the sand. This, in turn, led me to ask what sand was; that explanation then led to a discussion of why winds on the surface were stronger than the draughts in the caverns; and so it continued for nearly an hour, with every answer of hers inspiring a new query of mine. I don't suppose that our Rite-Mistress had ever in her life been so thoroughly interrogated by one of her charges – and yet, when we at length arrived at the cave-mouth, I was no more prepared than I had been for what awaited me. Lacking experience, one never thinks to ask the important questions.

* * *

><p>When we reached a bend in the cavern where the ground was marked with warm talitha resin, the Rite-Mistress let go of my hand. "Here we must part for now, Gabriela," she said. "When you turn this bend, the western mouth will be directly before you. That marks the beginning of your surface walk, though you will not be on the surface proper until you pass through the opening…"<p>

"And reach the sand," I interrupted eagerly.

The Rite-Mistress laughed. "Just so. And you must not be accompanied on your surface walk; therefore, I can go no farther with you. You will be responsible for yourself; how long you stay above, or how far you wander from the cave-mouth, are matters that only you can govern. Use wisdom, and may the Maker speed you."

Even then, strangely, I didn't think to ask _why_ I might not be accompanied. I assumed that it was because I was supposed, as my mother had said, to make friends with the sun, and making friends is easier when the two people are alone together. (I knew, of course, that the sun wasn't a person, but the analogy still seemed plausible to my childish mind.) So I merely bid the Rite-Mistress the appropriate farewell, turned toward the bend in the cavern wall, and, with a deep breath to calm my giddiness, stepped around the resinous boundary.

What lay on the other side…

I have heard that there is a human legend about a man who spent a night meditating under a tree, and, as dawn was breaking, suddenly realized that he was the universe. That is, perhaps, something like what I felt when I turned that corner and beheld the western mouth of the Vuunyar. All in a moment, everything I had ever known was turned upside-down; a new understanding, even a new way to understand, suddenly entered my ken, and at the same time I knew that it was more truly my own than all I had ever known before.

Yet it was unimpressive enough, as such things go. The Vuunyar's western mouth is little more than a glorified sinkhole, scarcely wider than the mollitor-span of a grown man; even under the best of circumstances, it doesn't let in enough sunlight to truly illumine much. A shaft of hazy radiance falling on some weathered limestone outcroppings: that, in truth, was all that I could see before me.

But I could _see_ it. That was the point. I had lived my entire life in darkness, and now I was _seeing_.

For a moment, my brain couldn't process it. All I knew was that my eyes – those odd, flesh-covered knobs in the front of my head, which I had never understood why it was so important not to injure – were suddenly twinging with mild pain, and that there was something wrong with the far end of the corridor. It took several seconds for my long-inactive sense of sight to claim its natural rights, and for the reality of colour to truly penetrate my dazed cognition.

Once it had, though – once I realised that I was perceiving things far distant, not as sounds or odours or heat-signatures, but actually as the spatial bodies they were – it did not take several seconds for me to cry out with delight, and rush forward the eight metres or so that lay between me and the cave-mouth. I doubt it even took one.

* * *

><p>By the cave-mouth, as the Rite-Mistress had foreshadowed, lay a thin layer of sand, blown in through the opening from the outside world. Under other circumstances, the sensation of the tiny rock particles against my feet would have been deliciously uncanny enough, but now I paid it no heed – or none to speak of, anyway. All my conscious attention was focused on the cave-mouth itself, and the indescribable vistas that it was revealing to my poor, unprepared, reeling, exultant Night-Born mind.<p>

You who read these pages, in all probability, have always lived within sight of a sky. To you, there is nothing remarkable in the sight; I have even heard humans describe it as "flat and uninteresting". I almost despair, then, of conveying to you the glory and wonder that entered my soul when I first saw that golden-pearly vastness lying like a watchful mother over the Kebiar horizon. I can only say that it intoxicated me with a sense of openness and invitation, as though a celestial voice were calling, _Come, Gabriela, and claim the boundlessness that is rightfully yours. The days of darkness and barriers have passed away, and all things are now possible; come, and partake of the countless delights with which the universe, for your sake, has been filled._

I pressed my mollitors close against my sides and scrabbled up through the opening, cutting my left hand on a jagged piece of stone as I did so. (I didn't notice this at the time, my attention being fixed on the world beyond, but it shortly became significant, as you will see.)

The next moment, I was outside – and, at that moment, I couldn't imagine ever going back in. Even the arid thirstland that surrounded the Vuunyar seemed, to my famished senses, a miracle of riches utterly unlike the dark confines in which I had hitherto lived. The taste of the air was sharper and fresher; the wind, as it blew against my skin and rustled my mollitors, seemed glad and raucous next to the Vuunyar's pitiful drafts; and the colours… oh, the colours. They were little more than the browns and dirty pinks of the region's ferrosilicate rock, with an occasional flash of dull green where a valiant little stalk of pasameie had sprung up, but to me they were more beautiful than all the songs and heat-charms in the universe.

And then, overarching and infusing itself into all, there was the sun. Imagine, if you will, that you have never in your life drunk anything but hard spirits or the juices of boiled cabbage – and then imagine that, one day, you stumble across a mountain spring, and discover for the first time what true water is like. Neither tepid and unsatisfying like infrared, nor bitter and overpowering like gamma radiation, but warm and pure and sweet and heady, the light of the blazing presence overhead poured through me, bringing strength to my limbs, keenness to my senses, and gladness supreme to my heart. In ecstasy, I unwrapped my mollitors and spread them as wide as they would go, extending each leaf so that I might have as much surface as possible to catch the sunshine.

As I did so, a curious shadow seemed to fall across the edge of my field of vision. I blinked once or twice, thinking it a trick of my eyes that would fade as they restored themselves, but it persisted – an odd, peaked blackness intruding into the sky on either side of me, just about in the place where… Yes, actually, that was exactly the place – and the shape was right, too…

I turned my head, and the impression was confirmed. Where I should have expected to see my left mollitor reaching toward the sun, I saw instead a mollitor-shaped region of darkness blotting out the landscape. It was an eerie sight – far more total than a mere shadow on the ground, and somehow less innocent, as well. It was as though my mollitor (for the shape certainly was my mollitor; I even waved it, to make sure) was a sort of ravenous monster, devouring light so greedily that there wasn't any left to shine on it.

I shuddered involuntarily; such thoughts are ugly to have about one's own body. Next moment, though, I reassured myself; what else, after all, could one expect, since I had never before tasted true sunshine? Of course, gluttony was an ugly thing, but it was surely excusable in this instance – and, once I had taken my fill, no doubt my mollitors would gradually become visible once again. Or, indeed, perhaps it wasn't a question of my devouring the light at all; perhaps the gift of sight was so made that one could never use it on oneself, but only on others. That would be sensible of the Maker, for sight seemed to render everything supremely beautiful, and contemplating one's own supreme beauty could easily lead to vanity.

I raised my left arm, and examined my hand. Yes, there, too, was the light-negating void; I couldn't even see the place on my palm where I had cut myself. (For I could feel, now, the slight throb of pain as my body worked to heal its wound – though it still seemed to matter little, in comparison with all the other things that I was feeling.)

As I moved and rotated my hand experimentally, however, I saw something fall out of it onto the ground – something small, and grey, and apparently round. I lowered my hand, and bent over the ground to see if I could find it, but to no avail; it seemed to have vanished utterly, leaving no trace except perhaps a faint greyish spot upon the pink-and-brown sand.

Puzzled, I raised my hand again and shook it, vigorously, several times. Sure enough, another small, grey shape fell out; I watched it, this time, as it fell, and saw it land at my feet with a tiny puff on the sand.

I reached down, picked it up, and examined it curiously. It was stone, as far as I could tell – something like the smooth limestone of the Vuunyar corridors, but harder and heavier, it seemed to me. It was hard to say, though, for it was tiny – only about a centimetre across, and quite perfectly spherical. Indeed, it seemed to be more spherical than nature could possibly have made it – yet there seemed to be no reason for such a thing to be made by hand.

_Perhaps it's one of my thoughts, _I thought whimsically. _They say that geometric figures are pure ideas, don't they? Then perhaps ideas are geometric figures. And it did seem to come from me – though I didn't know that I thought with my hand._

I shrugged, dropped the object into my palm, and closed my fingers over it, planning to carry it with me and ask Mother about it later. Then, suddenly, I felt it vanish; where the hardness and solidity of the thing had pressed against my palm, abruptly there was nothing but a faint, warm dampness.

I opened my hand again, but the little grey sphere, which should have been so conspicuous against the resolute blackness, was nowhere to be seen. Baffled, I sniffed at the damp spot where it had been, and found, more or less to my surprise, that it smelled like blood. (That was one smell I knew well enough; not only was my mother a healer, and our cavern, in consequence, always full of used wound-dressings that she hadn't yet gotten around to atomising, but I myself was a reckless enough child to have accumulated, by this time, more than my share of scraped knees and bloodied noses.)

A smell of blood – and the sphere had come from my cut hand. Could there be some connection between it and the still-bleeding wound? I didn't see how, but I supposed it was possible; so many other wondrous things had proven to be possible that day.

And, with that thought, I dismissed the matter from my mind. With the sunlight still surging through me, and the horizon still beckoning me with its promise of limitless adventure, it seemed the height of absurdity to waste one more instant's thought on something so trivial.

I turned to the east, putting the wind at my back; I folded my mollitors behind me; and I ran.

* * *

><p>The nice thing about being naturally "as swift as thought" (as the old poem describes us) is that it applies to your sensory processing as much as to the rest of you. Even moving at sixty knots, I didn't find the landscape blurring about me, as a human (I am told) would have; between my long-practiced heat sense and my newfound power of vision, each landmark I passed registered plainly in my memory, which in turn sorted them easily into a clear route back to the cave-mouth. It is a useful gift, when one has grown up in such a network of twisting corridors as the Vuunyar.<p>

Even without that power, though, I doubt that I would have worried much about getting lost. At that moment, few things in the universe mattered less to me than finding my way back to the cave-mouth. I never wanted to set foot in the Vuunyar's lightless bowels again; I wanted to spend the rest of my life – the rest of eternity, if it were offered me – there on the surface, smelling the wind, feeling the sand beneath my feet, and running with all my strength through this gloriously uncircumscribed world.

Did our Enemy, I wonder, know all that his curse would do to us? Did even he, for all his brilliance and malice, foresee the final twist of torment that would follow from that moment at the Pavilion of the Sun? Did he take an unholy pleasure in the thought, not merely that he had destroyed one of the great beauties of the galaxy and yet left it intact to lament its own demise – not merely that he had made the loving gaze of a parent or friend into a vehicle of living death – not merely that he had laid upon the gentlest and most peace-loving of mortal races a condition that would drive thousands of them to maniacal rage against the cosmos as a whole – not merely that this race would come to be regarded by aliens everywhere as a race of uncanny monsters, bogeymen and body-snatchers and living embodiments of terror – but, as the crowning touch, that a race of fleet-footed ambush predators, who had retained their ancestral fleetness even as they had renounced predation, should now be forced, if they wished to endure his curse peaceably, to immure themselves in limestone enclosures where no-one could even dream of running forever?

Who can say? The foul creature is dead now, they tell me – slain, or at least hastened toward death, by the mysterious spatio-temporal nomad called the Doctor. It is better so; would that his works could have perished with him.

But these thoughts were not – could not be – with me at the time. I thought of nothing, indeed, but the joy of coursing through the desert expanse – and I continued to burgeon in that joy, until at length my exertion outstripped the power of the sunlight in me, and I had to stop for a moment to regain my strength.

I fell to my knees, panting (yet exultant even in my weakness), and spread my mollitors once again. But now the sunlight flowed less freely into me – and, when I looked up, I saw why. Dark shapes veiled the sun, diffusing its beams through the air; the ultraviolet supply was unaffected, but the true light for which my body longed was scarcer than it had been.

It was cooler here, too – as was natural, of course, where the sunlight's warmth was lacking. And the wind seemed stronger, as well – or, at least, the sand directly in front of me was being agitated quite outrageously, and I couldn't think what but the wind might be causing that. But it was curious, because the sand wasn't swirling and spiralling, as it had in other places where the wind had caught it up; rather, it seemed to be heaving and shifting of its own accord, as though the land itself were restless.

I shuddered, wondering whether an earthquake was on the way; there had been one when I was five, and I had no desire to undergo another any time soon. But then the sand gave one last, mighty heave, and the true cause of its restlessness, to my startlement, emerged from beneath it.

It was perhaps five feet long, with a tubular body not quite as wide as my fist, from the sides of which emerged rows of leg-like appendages covered with webbing. A kind of short, almost liquid-looking fur, mostly teal but with three orange stripes near the middle, covered the rest of the body, except for four flat claws near the head that looked as hard and rigid as the rest of the creature looked soft and pliable. The head itself, apart from an opening near the bottom that I took for a mouth, seemed utterly featureless; there was no trace of a nose, and only two small, puckered holes on either side gave any impression that the creature might once have had eyes or ears.

It was, in fact, what the alien scientists who study Kebes call a ploomoreen – that is, a "rain-dancer". The promise of a storm had tempted it to the surface, so that it might perform its characteristic mating ritual without desiccating its spongy body. Why so naturally subterranean a creature should only be able to mate above ground is an enigma – to those, at least, who attribute to nature the same penalties for inefficiency that they enforce on craftsmen – but the ploomoreens seem not to have suffered from the arrangement.

But I, innocent that I was, knew nothing of this. I hadn't even thought to connect the dark shapes against the sun with the Rite-Mistress's description of clouds; much less did I understand that dark clouds foreboded falling water, or that the soft-bodied animals of Kebes required moisture about them in a way that I did not. All I saw was a quaint-looking creature – not at all like the polyscelates of the caves, it seemed to me, despite what the Rite-Mistress had said – that had popped out of the ground at my approach. Perhaps it wanted to be friends; anyway, it looked as though it would be pleasant to touch. So I reached out my hand, thinking to stroke its shimmery fur.

Then the puckered spots on the ploomoreen's head abruptly swelled, and, with an audible _pop!_, its four eyes emerged from their protective chambers.

* * *

><p><em>(Here there is an abrupt break in the original manuscript; though the above sentence appears near the top of a page, the rest of the page is blank, and the remainder of the text appears, from the different colour of the ink and certain indications in the handwriting, to have been composed somewhat later.)<em>

* * *

><p>Be it so, Destroyer. I will not shrink from speaking of it, as so many have done before me. I will not give you that satisfaction. Your day is ended; you and your works are unworthy of my fear. I am a creature of the light, and will not consent to dwell, either in body or in spirit, in the darkness to which you would bind me.<p>

The ploomoreen's eyes, then, emerged, and it saw me kneeling before it. I knew that they were eyes, and that it saw me, though the eyes of a ploomoreen are nothing like my own. I could not help knowing; I could feel its gaze upon me – a feeling that had nothing to do with any organ of sense, but seemed rather to come from the fundamental matter of my body itself. It was as though every atom in me were crying out in anguish, and the source of that anguish was the gentle invertebrate before me.

In that same instant, I felt myself changed. I felt the warmth and softness of life flee from my body; I felt myself grow cold, and dry, and rigid, and horribly, impossibly heavy. I tried to cry out, but I had no voice; I tried to turn and run away, but my body was no longer my body, and would not obey me. I was trapped in a nightmare, unable to move or speak or breathe – unable even to cry, for there are no tears in a block of stone.

I tried to believe that it was truly a nightmare, and that I would wake up in a moment in the sleeping area of my family chamber, with my mother hovering over me and whispering soothing words in my ear. But I knew that couldn't be, for I could never have dreamed a thing like sight, and, even amid this horror of petrifaction, I could still see. (Indeed, through a cruel irony, I could now see my own arm for the first time; where before it had been only an animate shadow, now it stood rigid before my gaze, grey and monstrous in the haze – just as, I realised with sickening certainty, a drop of my blood had done some minutes before.)

The ploomoreen, meanwhile, seemed curious about this strange formation before it. It crawled toward me in a queer, undulating fashion, raised its mouth, and nuzzled experimentally at my outstretched hand. (I could feel its touch against me, but only barely; it seemed faint and remote from me, like the sound of a falling stalactite three chambers away.) Then, evidently finding nothing to hold its interest, it turned itself laboriously northward and undulated out of my line of vision.

As it did so, I felt its gaze lifting from my body – lifting far more slowly than I should have liked, for the placement of a ploomoreen's eyes gives it quite a broad range of vision, but lifting nonetheless. Where before the sensation of being watched to annihilation had extended across the whole of my frontal region, now it covered only the left side of me – now, only the extreme left – now, only my elbow and the tip of my mollitor. Only a moment more, and it would pass entirely – and, with that thought, a wild hope sprang into my heart. Perhaps, once the creature ceased to see me, the horror that its gaze had worked upon me would also cease; perhaps I was not, after all, doomed to remain forever in this hateful state of neither-death-nor-life. I did not know that this was so, but it _might_ be so – and I begged the Maker that it should be so.

And so, indeed, it was. No sooner had the last sliver of my image faded from the ploomoreen's visual periphery than I felt the blessed warmth of life return instantaneously to my limbs, my face, my innards. The metamorphic prison was gone as though it had never been; my own true form, the flesh and blood and bone and foliage that I had received in my mother's womb, had been given back to me, and I was whole once again.

But then, before I could leap to my feet and flee that place of bitterness, I felt a new gaze fall upon me – this one coming from behind me and to my right, about a yard away. With the same instancy as before, the horrible lifelessness and immobility fell upon me afresh – and this time it did not pass, for, as the new observer was making its way around me, I saw, out of the corners of my eyes, two more ploomoreens burst from the ground and extend their eyes. The next moment, another one joined them – and then another, and another and another, until the ground about me was swarming with the silky undulators, and two or three dozen lines of four-eyed, unblinking vision were sweeping back and forth across my body like so many Earthly spotlights. None of them, I suppose, were looking specifically at me – they had more vital concerns just then – but, at any given moment, at least one or two of them had me, or a part of me, somewhere in view, and that was enough.

So thus I remained: a hapless child of an accursed race, alone on the surface of a primitive world, trapped in a mocking replica of myself, and not knowing how or why – hardly knowing anything, indeed, except that I wanted my mother more badly than I ever had before. (It didn't even occur to me, at that time, that my mother's gaze might likewise Lock me – and certainly not that mine might Lock her. It should have, perhaps, but I simply couldn't associate her with such defilement, either as vehicle or as victim.)

And then the storm began.

* * *

><p>When I felt the first droplets fall on my transmuted mollitors, I remembered the Rite-Mistress's description of rain, and understood that I was about to witness just such an event. Only a few minutes before, such a thought would have filled me with renewed excitement; now, however, as water began to pour upon me from the sky and flow in rivulets down my impervious form, it seemed to me almost a taunt, a reminder that my own body no longer contained this staple mark of life.<p>

_What did I do?_ I thought plaintively. What great evil could I have committed, to merit such a punishment? I knew that I wasn't perfect, that I had been selfish or disobedient or insolent quite as often as other children had – but could I really have been _this_ bad?

Perhaps I had delighted too much in the surface world. Perhaps this was what happened to youths who let the joy of sight lead them to despise the Vuunyar's darkness: the Maker used sight itself to chastise them, and make them think more lovingly of their native dwelling (which, at that moment, I certainly did). –But no, that couldn't be. The Maker was the Lord of nature, and even His greatest wonders shared its pattern; nothing so horridly unnatural could ever come from Him. Besides, if the surface walk carried with it such grievous moral peril, why should Mother or the Rite-Mistress not have warned me?

But then, _why?_ Why was this thing happening to me? Where had it come from? Why was it permitted? What had I _done?_

For nearly half an hour, as the rain poured down and the ploomoreens danced and fought and mated around me, I asked those questions over and over, and received no answer. Only a picture began to grow in my mind: a picture of a twisted abhorrence, a monstrous fusion of power and malice, who found it good in itself to spread darkness and sorrow wherever he went. Such a one, I thought, might do such a thing as had here been done to me.

But, if there were such a one, it was the duty of all that lived to curse and execrate him, and to labour with all their strength to oppose him and all his works. And so, then and there, I vowed; from that day onward, I was his enemy as he was mine, and I would play my part in scouring the universe of the stain he had brought upon it.

And yet – what stains could I scour, if I couldn't even bear the gaze of a dancing desert worm?

Then the horror and pity of my plight overwhelmed me anew, and I longed to bury my face in my hands and shut out the world. But my hands were still stony mockeries, and no power of mine could stir them; I remained as I had been when the ploomoreen's gaze had first caught me, wide-eyed and outreaching – and, somehow, that seemed the cruelest stroke of all.

But blessed be the Maker for time, which, though it ends all our joys, likewise permits no distress to last forever. Eventually, the rain subsided; the ploomoreens, having sufficiently ensured the next generation, retracted their eyes and dove back into the sand; and I felt my rightful body return to me. This time, I did not hesitate; I took to my feet, turned myself westward, and ran with all my strength back to the Vuunyar's mouth.

* * *

><p>As I lowered myself back through the narrow opening, the same jagged rock cut me again, this time on the knee. I didn't mind; the mere fact that I was soft enough to be cut was a joy beyond words, and more than made up for the sting of the wound. (Though I carefully avoided looking at the wounded area, lest I should happen to gaze again upon my blood.)<p>

As swiftly as I could, I put the dimly-lit corridor behind me, and turned the corner into the utter blackness of the Vuunyar proper. As I did so, I perceived two adult heat-signatures before me; the Rite-Mistress was still there, waiting for me, and my mother had evidently joined her. (I later learned that few new adults spend more than a few minutes on their first surface walk; daylight, it seems, is usually more of an acquired taste than it was for me, perhaps because I had no prior anticipation of the curse. Consequently, when half an hour passed without my return, my mother quite naturally feared the worst, and would have gone out to seek me had there been any sense in that; as it was, she could only wait as close to the cave-mouth as possible, hoping and praying for my safe return.)

I threw myself into her arms, gasping out incoherent fragments of sentences, trying fruitlessly to put into words some fraction of the horror and desecration that I felt. She, in turn, pressed me close and whispered that she knew, that it was her fault, that she should have told me. "But it's over now, darling," she said. "It's over, and you're safe here. That's why we're here, because it's safe."

And that was when I started to weep in earnest. I knew now that it was true, that the Vuunyar, or somewhere similar, was the only place where I could be safe from what had happened outside – and, more than words could say, I wanted to be safe from that. But, at the same time, I knew that I did not belong to the Vuunyar – that I was not meant to lurk in shadows, and that to accept such a fate was itself a capitulation to my Enemy. One way or another, my future life seemed doomed to be a thing of misery – and so I took refuge in the privilege of the miserable, and let my tears flow.

I heard the Rite-Mistress chuckle behind me – a sad, bitter sound, quite unlike any laugh I'd ever heard before. "It's true, the name they give us," she said. "They don't know it, but it's true. They say it because of our mollitors, and the way the yestering gangs cover their eyes – but if they could know about children like this one, grieving in their innocence for the evil state of the cosmos, they'd see how right they are to call us Weeping Angels."

And she and my mother lowered their heads and wept with me.

* * *

><p><em>(Thus concludes the declassified section of Special File Blanc. The remainder of the document still requires a mid-level U.N.I.T. clearance to view; whether it will be possible, at some future date, to release further portions, it is impossible, as yet, to say. Should this transcription be favourably received by the peoples of Earth, the officer aforementioned may perhaps regard an extension as worthwhile, despite the bureaucratic obstacles involved – for it is his view, as I have said, that some such vehicle of understanding may soon prove vital to the tranquillity of our world.<em>

_ (It is perhaps worthwhile to note that I make no proprietary claim with respect to any race, person, or organisation herein described, mention of which may be discovered elsewhere. Nor do I seek any profit from this transcription, save such general profit as may accrue thereby to the race to which I belong._

_ (Signed: N. P. Bowman, Honorary Corporal of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, acting under the authority of Brig.-Gen. A. Lethbridge-Stewart [ret].)_


End file.
